Tuesday, September 26, 2017

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Christos
Papachristos to present at Mountain Minds Monday: “Self-Flying Drones: On a
Mission to Navigate Dark, Dangerous and Unknown Worlds”

Even
with all our current technical advances, dangerous and unpleasant jobs are
still a part of modern life. Imagine a world where flying robots could be used
to navigate in any environment, under any possible conditions, and complete risky
tasks that humans currently perform.

Dr. Christos
Papachristos, Post-Doc Researcher at the Autonomous Robots Lab at University of
Nevada, Reno, will be speaking about how, without the benefit of GPS or previously
mapped environments, drones can be used in beyond line-of-sight operation to autonomously
navigate, map and explore dark and dusty, partially
sealed or underground, and generally visually-degraded environments like mines
or nuclear waste sites.

Dr. Papachristos
will discuss the use of regular cameras with flashers, inertial sensors, 3D-structure time-of-flight cameras combined with infrared cameras,
ionizing radiation detectors, and the logic behind the algorithms that guide
the drones on their missions.

Mountain Minds Monday will be on Monday, October 9th, 6-8 pm
at Pizza
on the Hill, in Tahoe Donner at 11509 Northwoods Blvd., Truckee. A $5
fee includes pizza and salad. Before and after the presentation, there will be
time for networking.

The event will also be livestreamed and available online as
it happens on YouTube: bit.ly/YouTubeTSM